Not terribly long ago, I was hanging out with local slot car legend and Thunderjet artisan Joel Furuli, when he said something that had once run through my own head, but which I had dismissed as fanciful:
“You gotta watch out for those tan ones,” he said, in reference to the color that the original Aurora cars were molded in often held by collectors to be the least desirable. I thought for sure that he was making a reference to their market value, but that wasn’t what he was saying at all.
“What do you mean,” I asked
“They’re the most fragile,” he replied.
So! It wasn’t my imagination! It had also occurred to me that there was something that seemed “different” about some of the tan colored bodies, especially after having the experience with buying a particularly valuable early T-jet body, which appeared to be in almost perfect condition, until I tried to mount it. Originally, I thought that the experience was unique to this particular car: that it had been exposed to extreme heat or some other condition that might’ve weakened the material it was made from. Since then, however, I have encountered a couple of other early bodies that were definitely more brittle than T-jets normally are…and all of them were tan!
Since then, I have discovered that this affliction does not appear to affect every tan colored body, but it does seem that there was a batch of tan cars, particularly in the early years of the Thunderjet design, in which something about the manufacturing process produced a run of tan cars whose chemical composition was different enough that they have become very brittle with age. This is a condition that diecast collectors may liken to the infamous Hot Wheels “crumblers,” a bad run of cars made in 1971 in which a poor quality batch of Zamac loaded with impurities produced baseplates that have deteriorated over time.
Why this only seems to affect tan colored cars is anyone’s guest, but without knowing all the intimate details of Aurora’s manufacturing process from start to finish, that does appear to be the case. And I know I acquired one of these cars a couple of years ago when I scored a 1963 Ford Galaxie police cruiser, the second one I had acquired in tan with a black roof. I bought it as a body only and it was delivered in excellent condition, yet when I went to mount it on a chassis, the screw posts absolutely disintegrated immediately upon assembly. I wound up having to fabricate a replacement screw post for the front using a piece of styrene tubing. As for the rear post: while it also split, it managed to hold well enough to keep the car together, but at the time I assembled it, I knew there was a little chance I was ever going to be able to take it apart again without even further damage occurring.
Fast forward to a weekday morning last week when I was at the track, running some of my cars, performing my regular weekday morning ritual, when the worst case scenario came to pass: that very car began to bog down on the track with its motor spinning at full speed, but virtually no movement, telling me I had just become a victim of the infamous Thunderjet “gear slippage” problem!
You know the condition I speak of: when either the front or the rear gears in the gear train begins to slip on its metal shaft. And once this starts, even if it is just slight at first, it will just keep getting worse until the motor may spin, but the car won’t run at all.
Arrrrgh! Of course that would have to happen to THIS car!!!!
So, this weekend, I knew I had no choice, but to make an attempt to disassemble this already fragile and weak body and attempt to repair the problem. What follows is the video record of how that procedure went! Do I still have a tan ‘63 Galaxie police car?? Tune in and find out, dear readers!
That is interesting about that certain color having fragility problems. That is something that I wouldn’t have thought of but there must be something in the manufacturing process for that color. There can be difference in brown and black leather due to tanning process to get the various colors. There are just so many unique details and personalities that these cars have!